This is a course about learning to use power and influence as effective tools for both understanding your surroundings and achieving your goals. It is a course about getting things done in the real world, where politics and personalities can often seem to hinder rather than help you. It is a course for those of you who want to make things happen, despite the obstacles that might stand in your way. The course will presents conceptual models, tactical approaches, and self-assessment tools to help you understand political dynamics as they unfold around you and develop your own influence style. By focusing on specific expressions of power and influence, this course gives you the opportunity to observe their effective—and ineffective—uses in different contexts and stages of a person’s career. This subject matter will introduce difficult ethical questions. By design, this course should challenge you to define for yourself what will constitute the ethical exercise of power and influence in your life. The objectives of the course are to help you:
Develop a conceptual framework for understanding power and influence. You should be able to define power and influence and begin to appreciate how essential they are for your own productivity. By identifying critical sources of political conflict, you can learn to ameliorate or harness them to produce constructive outcomes for you and your organization. Practice diagnostic skills that will enable you to map out the political landscape, understand others’ perspectives, and learn to predict their actions. Assess your own power bases and influence style, and consider strategies for expanding them. Begin to build a repertoire of influence tactics so you will be effective in a variety of contexts and situations. Develop your own strategy for developing and exercising power and influence ethically and responsibly in your career.

Course Schedule

Offering Dates: 03-31-2014 - 04-05-2014

DatesDayTimeRoom

03-31-2014 - 04-03-2014

MTWR

12:30 PM-1:50 PM

F309

04-04-2014 - 04-04-2014

F

2:00 PM-5:00 PM

F309

04-05-2014 - 04-05-2014

S

10:00 AM-1:00 PM

F309

Course Frequency

Occasional course offering

Course Information

Credits: 1

Pass/Fail Option: No

Prerequisite:

Grading: Graded

Method of Evaluation: Class participation and take home exam/short paper.